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CMS News Archives
What have we learned? What have we accomplished? Where do we go from here?
The full speaker list can be found at this sessions' website as well as a RealAudio stream.
The Media in Transitions conference is a joint effort of MIT Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum
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Continue reading "Podcast: Media in Transition 5: "Summary Perspectives"" »
Today, artists working in new media, including video, web projects and music confront contested and conceptually confusing terrain in which reproduction can be as perfect as the artist desires and endless copies theoretically possible. Yet many find the lack of clarity stimulating and a compelling space in which to break new ground. Why are so many artists today mimicking new forms of visual culture and their distribution systems -- even at the risk of confusion with their popular sources? How are artists debating the value of tightly controlling distribution of media art versus allowing its wider reproduction? What are the tradeoffs artists make between creating artificial scarcity to increase a work's unique value and increasing its visibility through broader reproduction? How are the needs of those who teach and write on video going to be met in the face of hyper-commodification?
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The full speaker list can be found at this sessions' website as well as a RealAudio stream.
The Media in Transitions conference is a joint effort of MIT Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum
Continue reading "Podcast: Media in Transition 5: "Reproduction, Mimicry, Critique and Distribution Systems in Visual Art"" »
It is possible that live performance is not so live any more. In this talk, Sharon Mazer looked at the ways that audience “performances” may be seen to challenge the live-ness of the onstage action in the Road to Wrestlemania 23, which the WWE takes to New Zealand in early 2007, and in Te Matatini, the National Kapa Haka Festival, a biennial Maori cultural performance competition happening that same weekend. Mazer is head of the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Canterbury (Christchurch, New Zealand). Her book Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle was published by the University Press of Mississippi, and her current research is focused on Maori performance.
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Continue reading "Podcast: What's Live Got To Do With It?" »
Historically, engineers learned by taking machines apart and putting them back together again. Can young people also learn how culture works by sampling and remixing the materials of their culture? Might this ability to appropriate and transform valued cultural materials be recognized as an important new kind of cultural competency, what some people are calling the new media literacies? How might we meaningfully incorporate this fascination with mash-ups into our pedagogical practices and what values should we place on the kinds of new content which young people produce by working on and working over existing cultural materials? In this program, we will showcase a range of contemporary projects that embrace a hands-on approach to contemporary and classical media materials as a means of getting young people to think critically about their own roles as future media producers and consumers.
Download Here!
The full speaker list can be found at this sessions' website as well as a RealAudio stream.
The Media in Transitions conference is a joint effort of MIT Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum
Continue reading "Podcast: Media in Transition 5: "Learning through Remixing"" »
How has the American tradition of intellectual property law understood the relationship between originality and tradition? What rights do artists and educators have to draw inspiration from or comment on existing works in existing media? What habits, beliefs, legal and policy decisions threaten the emergence of a more participatory culture? What have people done, and what can we do to protect the Fair Use rights of artists, educators, and amateurs so that explore the opportunities created by new media and a networked society?
The full speaker list can be found at this sessions' website as well as a RealAudio stream.
Download Here!
The Media in Transitions conference is a joint effort of MIT Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum
Continue reading "Podcast: Media in Transition 5: "Copyright, Fair Use and the Cultural Commons" »
"Collective Intelligence" and "the wisdom of crowds" have become central buzz phrases in recent discussions of networked culture. But what do they really mean? What do we know about the new forms of collaboration that is emerging as people work together across geographic distances online? Are we working, learning, socializing, creating, consuming, and playing in new ways as a result of the emergence of our participation in online communities? What have we learned over the past decade that may help us to design more powerful communities in the real world? What lessons can we carry from our Second Lives into our First?
The full speaker list can be found at this sessions' website as well as a RealAudio stream.
The Media in Transitions conference is a joint effort of MIT Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum
Download Here!
Continue reading "Podcast: Media in Transition 5: "Collaboration and Collective Intelligence"" »
Digital visionaries such as Yochai Benkler have described the emergence of a new networked culture in which participants with differing intentions and professional credentials co-exist and cooperate in a complex media ecology. Are we witnessing the appearance of a new or revitalized folk culture? Are there older traditions and practices from print culture or oral societies that resemble these emerging digital practices? What sort of amateur or grassroots creativity have been studied or documented by literary scholars, anthropologists, and students of folklore? How were creativity and collaboration understood in earlier cultures? Are there lessons or cautions for digital culture in the near or distant past?
The full speaker list can be found at this sessions' website as well as a RealAudio stream.
The Media in Transitions conference is a joint effort of MIT Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum
Download Here!
Continue reading "Podcast: Media in Transition 5: "Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures"" »
Recent trends in music composition push bounds by creating pieces which are either more complex or simpler than works of the past. And yet, our ability to understand and be interested in the compositions at these extremes has kept pace. In this talk, Michael Cuthbert shows how simple minimalist processes give rise to highly ambiguous structures, while many of the most complex moments are reducible to easier to comprehend processes. The effect of potentially endless works—including sections of Beethoven symphonies--will generalize the talk to other musical styles and other media. Cuthbert, visiting assistant professor of music at MIT, has worked extensively on fourteenth-century music and on music of the past 40 years. A recipient of the Rome Prize of the American Academy, Cuthbert earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2006.
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Continue reading "Podcast: Ambiguity, Process, and Information Content in Minimal Music" »
Our recent American Pro Wrestling class, taught by CMS grad student Sam Ford, and our series of Wrestling Colloquia have been in the news recently.
The Boston Globe, in "At MIT, students are credited with Smackdown," describes the class and our colloquium from March featuring Jim Ross of the WWE.
Students examine how technology has transformed wrestling into a multimedia business, and how the styles and storytelling methods have changed over the years.
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Why study wrestling? Ford hopes students "use the class to learn more about how to critically analyze, discuss, and write about the popular culture they consume." And he's not the only one who sees the academic value of it.
MIT's student paper, The Tech, also recently posted a summary of our last colloquium featuring WWE wrestler and bestselling writer Mick Foley.
The Mick Foley colloquium is now available online as part of the CMS Colloquia Podcast.
Mick Foley, one of the top wrestling performers of the past decade, alked about his experiences as an entertainer and bestselling author who has written three memoirs (including Foley Is Good: And the Real World is Faker Than Wrestling) two novels, and a variety of children's books. Foley has been a professional wrestler since the mid-1980s and was a headlining star for World Wrestling Entertainment (www.wwe.com) under the personas of Mankind, Cactus Jack and Dude Love. Foley will discuss telling stories in a variety of written and performative genres and how he has managed to bridge the gap across multiple genres and entertainment forms.
This is the 2nd part of our multi-part American Pro Wrestling series.
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Continue reading "Podcast: "The Real World''s Faker than Wrestling: Former WWE Champion and Best-Selling Author Mick Foley" »
American evangelicals have a long history of engagement with the media, dating back to Great Awakening of the late eighteenth century. Today evangelical groups are active in all media, from the Internet and cellular telephones to print journalism, broadcasting, film, and multi-media entertainment. In this Forum, our speakers discuss the social and political impact of the evangelical movement’s use of media technologies. Gary Schneeberger is special assistant for media relations to James Dobson, founder and chairman of the evangelical group Focus on the Family (www.family.org). Diane Winston is the Knight Chair in Media and Religion in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and author of Red-Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army. The Forum was moderated by the Rev. Amy McCreath, MIT’s Episcopal chaplain and coordinator of the Technology and Culture Forum at MIT (web.mit.edu/tac).
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Continue reading "Podcast: Communications Forum: "Evangelicals and the Media"" »
Alan Moore, CEO of engagement marketing company SMLXL and co-author of Communities Dominate Brands, believes that community-based engagement initiatives and the enabling of peer-to-peer flows of communication within organizations, and those that engage with them, will replace the traditional media orthodoxies of government, management, business, media distribution and marketing
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Continue reading "Podcast: "Old World, New World: How Communities, Culture, Connectivity, and Commerce are Changing How We Create Culture, Media, Education and Politics"" »
A conversation between Frank Moss, new director of the Media Lab, and CMS Director Henry Jenkins about ongoing projects and inventive digital applications at MIT's legendary laboratory. Demonstrations were also shown and discussed.
The MIT Communications Forum hosts a summary of the event.
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Continue reading "Podcast: Communications Forum: "What's New at the Media Lab?"" »
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